Shirley Sherrod Claims White House Forced Her To Resign

A black employee who resigned from the Agriculture Department on Monday said the White House forced her out after remarks that she says have sparked a fabricated racial controversy.

Shirley Sherrod, the former Georgia director of Rural Development, said she received a phone call from the USDA’s deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook on Monday while she was in a car. Cook told her that the White House wanted her to call it quits.

“They called me twice,” Sherrod told the Associated Press. “The last time they asked me to pull over the side of the road and submit my resignation on my Blackberry, and that’s what I did.”

The controversy began after several media organizations posted a 38-second video clip of Sherrod speaking to a local Georgia chapter of the NAACP. She tells the group that she did not give a white farmer “the full force of what I could do” after he asked for assistance.